The Pentagon’s advanced research arm is pursing privacy technology. And this time, it is technology intended to protect individual privacy rather than compromise it.
The new emphasis is a very different path from the one taken after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, embarked on the Total Information Awareness program. It was to be an all-seeing digital surveillance system to hunt for terrorists. The outcry from privacy advocates prompted Congress to shut it down. But the technologies developed by Darpa made their way into the intelligence agencies and the electronic-spying program that so disturbed Edward J. Snowden, who leaked tens of thousands of documents.
The new Darpa program is called Brandeis, a nod to the guiding principle of the research initiative. Louis Brandeis, a progressive lawyer who became a Supreme Court justice, was the co-author with Samuel D. Warren of an influential essay, “The Right to Privacy.” Published in Harvard Law Review in 1890, it forcefully made the case that safeguarding privacy was essential to individual freedom.
The Brandeis manifesto was published two years after the introduction of the Kodak film camera, a privacy-threatening technology of its day. It could quickly capture images, recording people in normal poses and spontaneous moments. The previous wet-plate, lithographic cameras required their subjects to present themselves in frozen stillness. But with a hand-held Kodak camera, photo snappers were suddenly taking pictures of people in public places — downtowns, ballrooms and beaches. The “camera fiends” were seen as a menace, and banned from beaches and from the Washington Monument for a while.
But while the times and the technology have changed, the fundamentals have not, according to John Launchbury, the Darpa program director for Brandeis. Privacy, he said, is a value at the heart of a free society, and an engine of progress.
“Privacy is a key enabler to things we care desperately about, like democracy and innovation,” Dr. Launchbury, a computer scientist and cryptographer, said in an interview on Friday.
Brandeis was one of several emerging-technology programs highlighted at a three-day conference last week in St. Louis, where Darpa invited 1,200 scientists and technologists from academia, large companies and start-ups. The event was part of the agency’s drive in recent years to woo leading researchers and entrepreneurs to collaborate with Darpa. That effort has been a hallmark of the tenure of Arati Prabhakar, a trained physicist and former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who became the head of Darpa in 2012.
Brandeis is just getting underway. The companies and universities joining the program have been selected. But most are still negotiating contract terms, with only a few announced, including SRI International and Stealth Software. The kickoff meeting for the participants will be in October. The program will run for four and a half years, and its budget will be “tens of millions of dollars,” Dr. Launchbury said.
Many companies and university researchers are working on privacy-protecting technologies. Yet Darpa will support early stage research in areas like advanced cryptography, a field known as multiparty differential privacy, and machine-learning software that can learn and predict a person’s privacy preferences — a clever digital assistant for privacy protection. The latter would be a big change from the complex privacy settings on search engines and websites now, which is a major reason much of the online population just accepts the default settings.
The free flow of data, Dr. Launchbury noted, should be enormously valuable across every industry and scientific discipline. But that will only happen in an environment of trust, where, he said, the prevailing attitude is that “you feel so in control of your data that you enable greater sharing at your discretion.”
Today, the data world is pretty much wide open, and entire industries rely on mining and marketing people’s data. If people have the ability to limit which of their digital footprints can be seen or tracked, doesn’t that undermine the business model of many ad-based Internet companies, including Google and Facebook?
Not necessarily, Dr. Launchbury replied. “It would be a matter of, You can use this data for these purposes in exchange for a set of free services,” he said. “At least then it’s a negotiation.”
Naming the program Brandeis suggests a recognition that technology will be only a part of the answer to privacy challenges. So will an evolving legal framework and public attitudes.
“Privacy is such a huge space,” Dr. Launchbury said. “What we’re working on here is not a solution. But we’re hoping to develop a new technical capability and society can decide whether it wants to use it.”